By Barbara Kay
Originally published in Vol. 1, No. 1 of The Dorchester Review, Spring-Summer 2011.
Review of Norman Podhoretz: A Biography. Thomas L. Jeffers. Cambridge University Press, 2010.
[Note: Norman Podhoretz died in New York on December 16, 2025 at the age of 95.]
FOR SIXTY YEARS, Norman Podhoretz has consistently ranked amongst America’s more influential, and also more controversial, political and cultural writers. And for much of that time he has been neoconservatism’s premier salesman in the market of ideas.
Neoconservatism was never an ideology or a movement or a political platform. It’s hard to pin it down, although many have tried. Sociologist Nathan Glazer kept it simple, describing a neoconservative as “someone who [formerly] wasn’t a conservative.” Neoconservatism was given a more nuanced persona by the recently deceased Irving Kristol (the “father of neoconservatism”) as a “persuasion,” a perspective on the broad range of cultural factors that mould a liberal democracy. Discerning the junction where culture, religion and politics meet and greet each other to mutual benefit was Kristol’s particular intellectual passion, and it was to become Podhoretz’s as well.
It was Kristol who coined the famous definition of a neoconservative as “a liberal who has been mugged by reality.” He had been a leftist in his youth; that was part of his post-enlightenment Jewish heritage. So much evil had come from the right in Jewish history that a kind of blind faith in the left embedded itself in the cultural DNA of Jewish intellectuals. That faith persisted against all reason when the left turned out to be as perfidious where Jews are concerned as the right had been in the past. The betrayal of the left, and its alignment with deeply anti-Semitic forces was a good part of the “reality” that Kristol felt he had been “mugged” by. Trying to convince stubbornly liberal Jews that socialism and the countercultural revolution of the 1960s were hostile to Jewish interests was a frequently-iterated theme of both Kristol’s and Podhoretz’s oeuvre.
More than anything else, and most controversially, neoconservatism came to be associated with a belief in America’s unique adventure in democracy as a template for other nations’ aspirations; a belief that demanded a commitment to stand by America’s democratic, and potentially democratic, friends and to seed democracy on whatever terrain is propitious for its growth. Hand in hand with that commitment went a firmly pro-Israel foreign policy.
Before long, neoconservatism began to find favour in America’s corridors of power, especially in the George W. Bush White House. Because so many of the persuaders of the powerful were Jews, it was not long before the word “neoconservative” in both far left and far right circles began emitting an anti-Semitic subtext, akin to the locution “rootless cosmopolitan,” code for “Jewish intellectual” in the Soviet Union.
Neoconservatism is an ugly sound in the mouths of liberals suffering from, in pundit Charles Krauthammer’s words, “Bush Derangement Syndrome.” It has been spun by its enemies into something resembling a Marx-meets-the-Protocols-of-Zion conspiracy theory, with philosopher Leo Strauss, Irving Kristol’s intellectual muse, posthumously cast as an Antonio Gramsci of the right, from his grave directing the march of his disciples through America’s institutions in the service of Israel’s interests.
Most of neoconservatism’s detractors have never read a word of Strauss. But western culture is dominated by double standards — one high moral standard for “imperial” America and Israel, and a very low one for everyone whose behaviours are motivated by grievances (real, imagined or fabricated) against them. In a postmodern intellectual void where narrative is a king, and evidence-based argument a pauper, the intellectual defence of neoconservatism has proved a rather Sisyphean chore.
Neoconservatism found its latter-day Sisyphus in Norman Podhoretz. Nobody has aimed higher or wider or more relentlessly in his ambition to restore belief and pride in American exceptionalism than he has. Through his writing — countless essays, speeches for influential political figures, many books and most importantly, through his long time stewardship of Commentary magazine, Podhoretz has helped to shape the discourse of the right on such disparate topics as civil rights, race relations, religion in the public forum, sexual politics, aesthetic devolution, anti-Zionism and the Iraq war.
Norman Podhoretz’s long, complex intellectual and personal odyssey has been thoroughly documented, richly annotated and sympathetically captured in Marquette University professor of literature Thomas L. Jeffers’s Norman Podhoretz: A Biography.
The first thing to strike the reader is the extraordinary range of Podhoretz’s contribution to America’s intellectual life. The Podhoretz gamut includes overlapping stints as: a literary critic; the editor of “America’s most consequential journal of ideas” (Washington Post); a political advisor and speechwriter, whose ideas and compelling rhetoric helped mould presidents’ beliefs and activities; a memoirist whose candour sparked animated debate and roiled codes of intellectual correctness amongst the chattering classes; and, of all things, a theodicist!
Second is the extraordinary passion Podhoretz brought to his thinking and writing and relationships. Persuasion, an art or a game to some, is a profoundly personal matter to Podhoretz. His convictions are swathed in emotional attachment, rooted in a deep, even mystical gratitude for his good fortune, which rested on three particular pillars: He was born in the only nation ever to welcome Jews to its bosom without reservation as full and equal citizens; he belonged to a religion, Judaism, whose monotheistic God had provided the world with all that was needed to build a just and peaceful social order, and whose central imperative, “choose life,” was the noblest ideal possible; and he was heir to a rich aesthetic culture in which unrivalled beauty and inspiration bloomed from artistic excellence joined to high moral seriousness. Gratitude bred intense loyalty to the institutions and people and social contracts that had produced the optimal cultural environment in which his manifold gifts could be realized.
Norman Podhoretz was born in 1930, in the Brownsville section of Brooklyn, to immigrants from Galicia, which during World War One had been conquered by Cossacks and occupied by Russians. All of Podhoretz’s family, neighbours and teachers were leftists in greater or lesser degree, and devotees of Franklin D. Roosevelt. His home, where his first language was Yiddish, was not religiously observant, but he was nevertheless given a rich Jewish education along with the cosmopolitan instruction he received at his Brooklyn high school.
Podhoretz showed intellectual promise very early. He won a scholarship to Columbia University and immediately achieved wide recognition for brilliance in his chosen field, literature, while at the same time attending the Jewish Theological Seminary at night to complete a degree in Jewish Studies. At Columbia he worshipped along with everyone else at the shrine of Lionel Trilling, guru to an entire generation of aspiring literary critics (he was Irving Kristol’s other great intellectual muse). Columbia was followed by three scholarship-funded years in England at Cambridge University, where he was privileged to study and hone his critical writing skills under the supervision of England’s premier literary critic, F.R. Leavis.
Podhoretz was entitled to a student exemption from the armed forces during the Korean War, but chose to enlist out of patriotism and, he admitted, as a means of testing his manhood. He didn’t see active duty, though, and was eventually posted to Germany with the Occupation forces. When a second lieutenant who was supposed to deliver a series of lectures based on a government-written “indoctrination course” (official words) keeled over with stage fright, young corporal Podhoretz, known to be a brainy college boy, was dragooned into explaining to a sea of enlisted men the difference between Them — the communists — and Us. He enjoyed the experience immensely (“the most successful thing I’ve done in my entire life”). It combined with coincident experiences — he had met Jean-Paul Sartre in Paris and been dumbfounded by his Stalinist apologism; he had recently read and been bowled over by Hannah Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism — to assure him he had found his métier, an analyst and communicator of ideas, and his great subject.
The opening sentence of Podhoretz’s 1967 book, Making It, is “One of the longest journeys in the world is the journey from Brooklyn to Manhattan.” At the time of Podhoretz’s return to America in the mid-fifties, New York was a hotbed of intellectual and cultural ferment. The Soviet nuclear threat following hard on the heels of World War II and revelations of a holocaust still too overwhelming to be assimilated, coincided with the emergence of the most intellectually gifted concentration of brain power in modern times, known as “The Family.”
The Family was a loosely defined assemblage of New York intellectuals, almost all Jewish — liberal, largely anti-Soviet and pro-Freud — who considered themselves to be at the “bloody crossroads” where literature and politics met. Emerging from immigrant households exactly like Podhoretz’s, they were great incubators of a peculiarly Jewish intellectuality. Pre-eminent amongst the magazines catering to the discerning lay reader’s appetite for “the life of significant contention,” as Trilling’s wife Diana put it in her memoir, were two magazines, Commentary and the quasi-Trotskyite, similarly highbrow Partisan Review, (although, as then-Commentary editor Elliot Cohen cheekily explained to Podhoretz at their first meeting, “The main difference between Partisan Review and Commentary is that we admit to being a Jewish magazine and they don’t.”)
The Family were “public intellectuals” before the locution was invented. Their opinions mattered. And they had opinions on everything, churning out articles by the score on the relationship of Stalinist Russia to socialism, campus radicals — heroes or hooligans? — the social debt owed to Blacks and how best to pay it, and the future of marriage in a sexually transgressive age, to name a few.
Elliot Cohen remained at the helm of Commentary until his death in 1960. He was successful in shepherding some of the Jews who were alienated from America (a result of their immersion in Marxism) into self-identification as Americans. In 1960, Esquire called Commentary the “red-hot centre of the literary world.” Until the New York Review of Books came along, Commentary had no real competition at the “high seriousness” end of the New York magazine market.
Podhoretz joined Cohen’s team at Commentary and, in due course, and for thirty-five years thereafter (1960-95) skippered what many respected observers from the right and the left praise as (or concede to be) the most rewarding monthly journal of ideas and criticism in America, and the principal vehicle for conveying neo-conservative ideas and discourse into mainstream political conversation.
You could not be a member of the Family unless you were acknowledged to be “brilliant.” To be brilliant, as Podhoretz once put it, was to have “the virtuosic ability to put ideas together in such new and surprising combinations that even if one disagreed with what was being said, one was excited and illuminated.” •
What “excited and illuminated” the Commentary family? Jeffers writes: “Podhoretz and his neoconservatives allies, whether wonkish or in some cases literary, [have] waged a counter-countercultural campaign that could be summed up as follows. America, for all its miscalculations in Vietnam, could and should continue the war against left-wing totalitarianism. Individual merit, not sex, race or ethnicity, should be decisive in questions about who gets into a school, who gets a job, or who gets a raise. Aesthetic excellence, not the biological or sociological categories an artist falls into, should determine the status of his work. Above all, the freedom of the individual, whether artist, merchant, teacher, machinist, physician, or whatever, to offer his services or sell his goods in the open market was inseparable from political freedom as such — the freedom to publish, to assemble, or to send representatives into government.”
Podhoretz became famous for his own brilliant writing, which was now appearing in the New Yorker and anywhere else he pleased. Fame led to invitations and friendships with celebrities, and he dove into the flattering social whirl with shameless wholeheartedness. Burning the candle at both ends appealed to Podhoretz’s Rabelaisian appetite for social stimulation and career advancement.
Now married to Midge Decter, a divorcée with two daughters and herself a formidable public intellectual, he was, still in his twenties, embarked on a bourgeois course of marital and parental commitments that strengthened, rather than diluted, his self-confidence and productivity. The couple threw great parties and were invited to the best themselves. At one such party he met playwright Lillian Hellman, who rather dazzled him in spite of her soft-on-Stalinism views and “fat streak of anti-Semitism.” She eventually became an ex-friend. Jackie Onassis took a shine to Podhoretz, and once asked him to draw up a dinner list for her. He excluded his volatile and unpredictable friend, Norman Mailer from it, one of the reasons that led to their falling-out later.
Podhoretz was resented by the cultural elites of his day for his bourgeois perspective on success. Spiteful gossip raged. When his frankly boastful book, Making It, bruiting his pleasure in his material and social success, came out, many of his tweedy, leather-patched-elbow peers turned feral in their criticism. Capturing the general disgust in his review, Catholic novelist Wilfrid Sheed sputtered: “The words we might use to condemn him have all lost their jurisdiction overnight: from arriviste to apple polisher to sellout.” Thirty years later Sheed saw Podhoretz at a social gathering and Podhoretz refused his outstretched hand, saying: “The statute of limitations has not run out yet.”
Podhoretz regarded the widespread vituperation as “unjust” and even “theological,” because the book “assume[d], in fact it argues, (paraphrasing George Orwell, whom Podhoretz revered and claimed as an ideological confederate) that “it is possible to live a reasonably decent life and maintain one’s moral, intellectual and spiritual integrity without becoming a revolutionary,” amongst left wing intellectuals “a kind of blasphemy.”
Brilliance was no help to a family member when he strayed from the party line. And that line, whether anti-Stalinist, anti-anti-communist, Trotskyite, or simply fellow-travelling, was almost always to the left of where Podhoretz felt himself being drawn. As he would elaborate in his 2000 book, Ex-Friends, brilliance could be used in the service of wrong ideas as well as right, and for someone who traffics in ideas, and for whom ideas are at the core of identity, friendship cannot flourish in the presence of perceived dishonour. It is because Podhoretz’s quarrels with the world were never abstract, always embodied in some or other spokesperson, that the trajectory of his friendships and their occasional unravelling provide some of the book’s most interesting material.
He would break his friendship with the beat poet Allen Ginsburg, for instance, because of the sexually transgressive obsession in his work (Ginsburg urged the idea “that the perverse was infinitely superior to the normal”) and that of other beat writers, who gave evidence of a pagan mentality, “and a willingness to look upon cruelty and bloodletting with complacency, if not downright enthusiasm.”
Podhoretz’s refusal to deal in generalities, his insistence on measuring theories and ideas against the yardstick of particular events on real ground motivated his more discomfiting essays in Commentary. A famous case in point is his February, 1963 article, “My Negro Problem and Ours,” written during “three hot, blissful sessions at the typewriter,” which managed to offend almost everyone — integrationists, black nationalists, whites and Jews — and which he believed might actually result in Commentary closing down.
The subject of Jewish-Black relations had been churning inside Podhoretz for some time. He wanted to expose “all the sentimental nonsense that was being talked about integration by whites who knew nothing about Negroes, and by Negroes who thought that all their problems could be solved by living next door to whites.” Unlike most liberal whites, Podhoretz had lived side by side with Blacks in Brownsville. The particulars of that time and place did not square with the perception of blacks and Jews being generated by blacks themselves and a credulous media: the Jews he knew weren’t rich, they were poor; the blacks he knew weren’t persecuted; they were persecuting. Podhoretz’s childhood memories of blacks were ambivalent. He remembered bullying blacks who were also physically graceful and uncowed by authority. In a way he envied them, for they were “really bad, bad in a way that beckoned to one, and made one feel inadequate.” He remembered reciprocal fear and hostility between Jews and blacks, and therefore felt the integrationist ideal of brotherly acceptance was unrealistic and doomed to failure. He had no use for black separatism, which went hand in hand with quite rabid anti-Semitism, a fact that was continually glossed over by guilt-ridden liberal Jews. He believed America’s past sins should not translate into a permanent double standard for whites and blacks, and that assimilation to standard American values would be the solution for blacks as it had been to other cultural groups.
Such political incorrectness could not, and did not go unpunished, but the article was a watershed in terms of what had been, but would no longer be inadmissible discourse in the public forum. “My Negro Problem — and Ours” unstoppered a bottle full to the point of shattering with civic frustration. It gave licence to troubled but fearful, self-censoring whites (and conservative blacks) to express their concerns about black rage and its unhealthy consequences for the common weal. Anti-American racists like Barack Obama’s pastor of twenty years, Jeremiah Wright, may still fulminate against whites, but it is thanks to Podhoretz that rational and non-racist whites no longer feel guilty about denouncing him for what he is.
On the defense of Israel as a legitimately American act of patriotism, and an existential concern for Jews, Podhoretz has been resolute, immovable. As he told the Jerusalem Post, “I have an almost mystical belief that if another major Jewish community [Israel] were destroyed in this century ... it would prove that there was a will at work to wipe the Jews off the face of the earth entirely.” Podhoretz simply could not fathom the ignorance, denial and complacency of liberal Jewish alignment with the enemies of Israel. (Neither could Irving Kristol, who in 1999 wrote an article with the revelatory title, “On the Political Stupidity of the Jews.”)
Of particular interest are the friendships that resulted in Podhoretz’s indirect and direct political influence at the highest levels. Jeane Kirkpatrick came to be known as the “ambassador from Commentary,” because it was the publication of her essay, “Dictatorships and Double Standards” in the November 1979 issue of Commentary that brought her to Ronald Reagan’s admiring attention, and thence to her position as ambassador to the United Nations. When Podhoretz published his essay, “The Neo-Conservative Anguish over Reagan’s Foreign Policy,” Reagan called him to discuss it, and as well urged all Americans to “read this critically important book”: that is, Podhoretz’s, The Present Danger, written to promote the Truman Doctrine that promised support for free peoples. Reagan did not extend such an honour to any other public intellectual.
Henry Kissinger and Podhoretz saw eye to eye on many issues, although they disagreed on tactics, such tensions proving fruitful for both of them as intellectual exercises. In January 1985, at the 25th anniversary party of Podhoretz’s tenure at Commentary, Kissinger toasted Podhoretz:
What is an intellectual to do in a society which thinks that ‘peace’ is a subject to be studied, which thinks stability is the normal condition, which has no experience with evil, which has never known irremediable disaster? ... For all these reasons, it is right and proper and crucial for all of us that Norman is an implacable nag, that he will not make compromises. I, myself, substantially agree with his analysis of international affairs. At the same time, he and I have argued forever, because he looks at policy from the perspective of a prophet and I look at policy from the perspective of a policy-maker. He insists the truth is absolute. He is right. I believe that it has to be reached in imperfect stages.
Most rewarding of Podhoretz’s friendships in high places was his long “intellectual symbiosis” with Daniel Patrick Moynihan (although it faltered when Moynihan’s senatorship proved a lacklustre dénouement to his riveting ambassadorship to the UN). Moynihan believed that Podhoretz had, according to a mutual friend, “single-handed effected a change in America’s political consciousness.” During Moynihan’s eight-month tenure as America’s UN ambassador in 1975-6, his more eloquent speeches were mostly written by Podhoretz, including his formidable pièce de résistance, Moynihan’s thundering denunciation of the 1975, Arab-fomented “Zionism is racism” resolution.
Moynihan’s eight months in office were a triumph. Americans loved him. For a giddy (sadly illusory) moment neoconservatives like Podhoretz believed that “the long era of self-flagellation and self-hatred through which we had lived since the mid-1960s was finally reaching its end.” (With a slight pause for 9/11 obsequies to the dead, self-flagellation and self-hatred amongst liberal elites has continued unabated, but at least robustly contested, thanks to Podhoretz and his disciples, to this day.)
Podhoretz was also Rudy Giuliani’s senior advisor on foreign affairs during his campaign for the nomination as the Republican party’s presidential candidate. And George W. Bush was a respectful and attentive student of Podhoretz’s reasoning.
It was in the years following his retirement from that Podhoretz wrote some of his finest works. Between 1999 and 2002, he published Ex-Friends, My Love Affair with America, and The Prophets, a scholarly work on the Bible and the relationship between ethics and ritual. Even though he and his wife were non-observant and remarkably hands-off in educating their children Jewishly, Podhoretz really did believe God is present in our lives through the moral laws He endowed humanity with — and, he argued, there are no better moral laws than can be found in the Jewish Bible, nor any more compelling exhortations to fulfil them than the plangent, God-intoxicated invocations of the ancient prophets, ideas he elaborated in his eponymous late-life theodicial paean to them.
Post-9/11, Podhoretz wrote a long essay in Commentary, “How to Win World War IV,” that went viral. It was turned into a book that sold more than any he had written before. On Islamofascism Podhoretz has been a fire-breathing dragon. Triumphalist Islam is for him déjà vu — Communism with a theocratic face — all over again. Ordinary people understand that the root cause of terror is terrorists. Podhoretz’s diatribes against Islamism have been a rebuke to a liberal press that seems more intent on what the terrorists have been saying — listening to their so-called grievances, as if excuses of any kind were possible for such obscene disregard for innocent life — than on what they are doing and intend to do.
Norman Podhoretz’s life in letters and polemics has indeed been “my love affair with America.” Too much of one for many, and lately, even for his hardiest fans, slightly unnerving. (He is a fan of Sarah Palin; many neoconservatives are not. He would agree with Irving Kristol that although populism can be dangerous, it can also be a “corrective to the defects ... often arising from the intellectual influence of ... our intellectual elites.”)
For Podhoretz journalism is patriotism, and the task he set himself was to give those who hate America “a proper object of love — their own country, rightly understood.” He assessed his mission in a kind of credo in his remarks at his tribute dinner:
I am proud that I have been able, in and through Commentary, to defend my own — my own country and the values and institutions for which it stands; my own people and the religious and cultural heritage by which we have been shaped. Like so many of us, I was educated to believe that the last thing one ought to be defending was one’s own, that it was more honorable and nobler to turn one’s back on one’s own and fight for others and for other things in which one had no personal stake or interest. This has been a very hard lesson to unlearn, and I am proud to have unlearned it. ...
Commentary has defended America at a time when America has been under moral and ideological attack. Commentary has defended the Jewish people and the Jewish state when they too, and for many of the same reasons, have been subjected to a relentless assault on their legitimacy and even their very existence. For me there has been no conflict or contradiction in defending this dual heritage by which I have been formed. As an American and as a Jew, I have seen that distinctive new species of tyranny, totalitarianism — and especially in our day its Communist variant — as the main threat to the values and institutions of liberty. I am proud to have devoted myself so fully to the fight against that threat and the correlative fight for the survival of liberty.
Has he succeeded? I think history will record that he was instrumental in turning the tide of cultural self-loathing in America in a significant, consequential way. Podhoretz has for decades been a magnet for hatred and loathing amongst progressive intellectuals and pundits. His close friend, prominent BBC broadcaster and educationalist Huw Wheldon once told him, “If you hold out long enough, you’ll become venerable.” And he has for a solid and growing number of thoughtful Americans (and others), who for good and realistic reasons feel they are watching the sun set on western civilization in its freest and most confident and robust incarnation.
In June 2004 Podhoretz revelled in “the most wonderful honor to come my way” when he was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the highest honour that can be awarded to a civilian, by George W. Bush, perhaps the only American hated with more virulence than Podhoretz. Podhoretz wrote to a friend that “when Bush put the medal around my neck, I whispered to him, ‘I wish I could give one of these to you.’ To which he responded, ‘Well, bless you for that ... I’m only getting started, you know.’”
(There is prophecy in this bit of banter. The startling revolutionary ardour we are presently witnessing in the Middle East; the casting off of autocracy and the calls for freedom from dictatorship in Tunisia, Egypt, Libya and Iran can be directly traced to Bush’s insistence that “every human heart” desires freedom, and that it is wrong to claim that any particular culture is immune from that universal law. It pains liberals too much to draw that obvious line, of course. His name and the persuasion that fuelled his sympathy for the oppressed of the region are shamefully absent from liberal commentary on current affairs.)
Podhoretz’s relationships with friends and feuds with ex-friends and walkabouts in the corridors of power reinforced his sense of mission: to re-invoke old norms in a riven culture; to defend the proposition that virtue and vice are valid concepts in a culture dominated by the voices of ecumenical niceness and moral relativism in all things. He has battled hard against all abstract ideas — pacifism, unbounded sexuality, multiculturalism — that represent a repudiation of human nature, which has fixed limitations to its plasticity: “There exists an unchanging human nature of things to which we are best off submitting.” This was a rubric Podhoretz learned from literature, his first love. Great literature illuminates the eternal verities of human nature, which is perhaps one reason why postmodernists work so hard to undermine its authorities. Podhoretz realized early in his intellectual evolution that “radicals who seek as earnestly to transform themselves as to transform society have generally been hostile to literature.”
The Family was a phenomenon unlike any we are likely to see again — how many people really care any more what intellectuals think of each other’s ideas? This biography — almost entirely uncritical, yes, but richly informative and smoothly crafted — is worth our attention. At least I found it worth mine, because in many ways I am who I am because of Norman Podhoretz. He cured me of fuzzy reasoning and sentimentalism on a full gamut of political issues. And it is Commentary magazine that has for the most part shaped my ideal for the critical journalistic writing that, quite accidentally, became my late-life career. Then too, my mother was American. And so I have written this review with something like the same gratitude for Podhoretz that Podhoretz has demonstrated for the blessings bestowed on him by his beloved country. And, in part, mine. Perhaps it shows.